Canada

That'll teach the competition bureau from... checks notes... Doing its job?

Canada's competition laws are a joke. All Rogers/Shaw had to do was to prove that the merger would be profitable for themselves.

That's it. For the merger to be approved, they had to prove it would be profitable.

Canada's monopoly laws actively encourage monopolies.

The country is a joke

The bureau's biggest concern was the deal would lessen competition in a country where wireless bills are already among the highest in the world.

In March, Canada approved Rogers' buyout of Shaw Communications after securing binding commitments to pay financial penalties if it failed to create new jobs and invest to expand its network.

"We're concerned this blatant monopolization is going to cost Canadians more money on their basic services."

"Yeah, but if they throw a couple management positions in and hide their profits in 'network investments' (which may or may not include gobbling up even more service providers), then it's all good, right?"

The back-story here: a couple of decades ago, Rogers decided to expand east after profitable regions, instead of being a western cable company in direct competition with Shaw. After they realized how much more money they were making, they then sold Western Canada holdings to Shaw.

Fast forward to today, and these not-really-competing cable companies turned media conglomerates want to merge, leaving us with Telus and Bell as the competition.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Aug 29 (Reuters) - Canada's merger court asked the competition bureau to pay about C$13 million ($9.58 million) to Rogers Communications (RCIb.TO) and Shaw Communications for the lengthy court battle after its failed attempt to block the telecom firms' C$20-billion merger.

The Competition Tribunal, Canada's merger court, in a ruling dated Aug. 28 said the Commissioner of Competition Matthew Boswell's approach to block the deal was "unreasonable".

The companies maintained that Boswell "adopted an unnecessarily contentious approach throughout the litigation, which significantly increased the costs that they were required to incur," the tribunal said.

The Rogers-Shaw merger had faced intense opposition from Canada's antitrust regulator whose efforts to block it were rejected by the Competition Tribunal and a Canadian court.

The bureau's biggest concern was the deal would lessen competition in a country where wireless bills are already among the highest in the world.

In March, Canada approved Rogers' buyout of Shaw Communications after securing binding commitments to pay financial penalties if it failed to create new jobs and invest to expand its network.

The original article contains 179 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 3%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!